Disambiguation of author entities in ADS using supervised learning and graph theory methods

Disambiguation of authors in digital libraries is essential for many tasks, including efficient bibliographical searches and scientometric analyses to the level of individuals. The question of how to link documents written by the same person has been given much attention by academic publishers and information retrieval researchers alike. Usual approaches rely on publications’ metadata such as affiliations, email addresses, co-authors, or scholarly topics. Lack of homogeneity in the structure of bibliographic collections and discipline-specific dissimilarities between them make the creation of general-purpose disambiguators arduous. We present an algorithm to disambiguate authorships in the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) following an established semi-supervised approach of training a classifier on authorship pairs and clustering the resulting graphs. Due to the lack of high-signal features such as email addresses and citations, we engineer additional content- and location-based features via text embeddings and named-entity recognition. We train various nonlinear tree-based classifiers and detect communities from the resulting weighted graphs through label propagation, a fast yet efficient algorithm that requires no tuning. The resulting procedure reaches reasonable complexity and offers possibilities for interpretation. We apply our method to the creation of author entities in a recent ADS snapshot. The algorithm is evaluated on 39 manually-labeled author blocks comprising 9545 authorships from 562 author profiles. Our best approach utilizes the Random Forest classifier and yields a micro- and macro-averaged BCubed $$\mathrm {F}_1$$ F 1 score of 0.95 and 0.87, respectively. We release our code and labeled data publicly to foster the development of further disambiguation procedures for ADS.

History of Astronomy in Australia: Big-Impact Astronomy from World War II until the Lunar Landing (1945–1969)

Radio astronomy commenced in earnest after World War II, with Australia keenly engaged through the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. At this juncture, Australia’s Commonwealth Solar Observatory expanded its portfolio from primarily studying solar phenomena to conducting stellar and extragalactic research. Subsequently, in the 1950s and 1960s, astronomy gradually became taught and researched in Australian universities. However, most scientific publications from this era of growth and discovery have no country of affiliation in their header information, making it hard to find the Australian astronomy articles from this period. In 2014, we used the then-new Astrophysics Data System (ADS) tool Bumblebee to overcome this challenge and track down the Australian-led astronomy papers published during the quarter of a century after World War II, from 1945 until the lunar landing in 1969. This required knowledge of the research centres and facilities operating at the time, which are briefly summarised herein. Based on citation counts—an objective, universally-used measure of scientific impact—we report on the Australian astronomy articles which had the biggest impact. We have identified the top-ten most-cited papers, and thus also their area of research, from five consecutive time-intervals across that blossoming quarter-century of astronomy. Moreover, we have invested a substantial amount of time researching and providing a small tribute to each of the 62 scientists involved, including several trail-blazing women. Furthermore, we provide an extensive list of references and point out many interesting historical connections and anecdotes.

Collection Development for Librarians in a Hurry: A Survey of the Physics Resources of the Libraries of the Association of American Universities

This study is an examination of the databases, websites, journals, and monograph titles most frequently included in the library resource guides of 65 well-regarded research institutions. Through an analysis of library resource guides, this study enumerates the resources most frequently recommended to the physics community for study and research. Open access resources, such as arXiv, SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), and INSPIRE, are among the most included titles. Notably, websites of professional organizations and governmental agencies are also frequently named. The study is meant to assist librarians in developing and maintaining collections to recommend to the physics community.

Bibliography of the works by Piotr Flin (1945–2018), an astronomer and exact sciences historian

The bibliography presents the list of publications by Piotr Flin (1945–2018), an astronomer and exact sciences historian. This study presents a list of two hundred and fifty (including two hundred and forty-three separate) publications of the late Piotr Flin and a list of three doctoral theses he supervised. It is likely that the list of publications presented is not a complete bibliography of the author’s works. Due to the specificity of the study, the co-authored publications are listed in a chronological order, not an alphabetical order of co-authors. In addition, compared to the standard bibliographical style adopted in the journal, the date of publication appears at the end of each bibliographic record in square brackets. Providing the date in this format follows the convention adopted on the SAO / NASA portal Astrophysics Data System and its enriched copy: “The Science Archive Facility” at the European Southern Observatory. In accordance with the conventions adopted in the aforementioned portals, the list of publications also includes two reviews of a co-authored monograph by P. Flin.

Measuring Research Impact of Astronomers/Astrophysicists by using Astrophysics Data System Beta: A Powerful New Interface: A case study with Special Reference to Prof. Jayant V. Narlikar

This paper highlights qualitatively and quantitatively research and presents a valuable overview of new citation enhanced databases in the context of research evaluation for the productivity of Prof. Jayant V. Narlikar. He has total 472 research publications in the fields of Astronomy and Astrophysics (AA) published from 1961-2015. In addition, this paper provides an overview of the citation-enhanced databases viz Astrophysics Data System Beta: A powerful new interface for performing citation analysis. Previously, scientometrics had been used to measure the publication productivity of Prof. Jayant V. Narlikar using the Astrophysics Data System (ADS). The scope of this paper is limited to Astrophysics Data System Beta. The result indicates that most of his papers are published in peer reviewed journals having the highest Impact Factor. The average number of publications per year is 8.74 and with the maximum papers published during 1981-1990 and 1996-2000. The total number of citations for his publications is 3516 covering 665 of his papers published during 1961-1970. He had many research collaborations, specifically with Prof. F. Hoyle (87 papers), Prof. G. Burbidge (38 papers), Prof. N. Wickramasinghe (22 papers) and Prof. T. Padmanabhan (21 papers).

Evaluation of research publications and publication channels in astronomy and astrophysics

The astronomy community usually turns to the Astrophysics Data System for bibliometrics. When the context is cross-disciplinary, commercial products like Web of Science and Scopus are used along with related analytics tools instead. The results are often tainted by inherent problems in the chosen classification system. A review of the most common challenges and pitfalls is given. Commercial altmetrics products could be added to the evaluation toolbox in the near future despite the fact that they are best suited for promotion instead of evaluation. Norway, Denmark, and Finland have created journal and publisher ranking systems that are used in national funding models. Differences in how astronomy journals are weighed in these systems night be related to the volume of papers published on a national level.

New ADS Functionality for the Curator

In this paper we provide an update concerning the operations of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), its services and user interface, and the content currently indexed in its database. As the primary information system used by researchers in Astronomy, the ADS aims to provide a comprehensive index of all scholarly resources appearing in the literature. With the current effort in our community to support data and software citations, we discuss what steps the ADS is taking to provide the needed infrastructurein collaboration with publishers and data providers. A new API provides accessto the ADS search interface, metrics, and libraries allowing users to programmatically automate discovery and curation tasks. The new ADS interface supports a greater integration of content and services with a variety of partners, including ORCID claiming, indexing of SIMBAD objects, and article graphics from a variety of publishers. Finally, we highlight how librarians can facilitate the ingest of gray literature that they curate into our system.